Wednesday, December 16, 2015

PAMPLONA, Spain -- In August of 2013, Olga Ruiz returned from a refreshing summer vacation ready to start her 16th season on the COPE radio network in Barcelona.

But on her arrival, the managers told her and her team that they were being fired. "The best period in my professional life began the moment they fired me," she told me. "They gave me a second life in journalism."

Two weeks later, she invited her old team and some other journalists to her home for dinner. They decided to launch a new radio organization with long-form stories of up to 30 minutes on topics ignored or treated superficially by mainstream media. They would devote obsessive attention to the quality of the sound.Versión en español

Thursday, December 3, 2015

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- Oscar Castilla spent 12 years at El Comercio, Peru's most important daily newspaper, honing his reporting skills with investigations of organized crime and corruption.

Versión en español Then in 2014, Castilla and some colleagues from the investigative unit decided to leave the paper for editorial reasons. "The editor at the time had one view of journalism and we had another," he told me in an interview. "We wanted to do some innovative things and the organization was against it." So they decided to launch their own news publication online, Ojo Público (Public Eye). Their first investigation about conflicts of interest among the mayors in metropolitan Lima was honored in Barcelona in June with a Data Journalism Award from the Global Editors Network.

International experience

James Breiner

Bilingual consultant, teacher, trainer in digital journalism

James Breiner is a digital media consultant, bilingual in Spanish and English. He specializes in journalism innovation, entrepreneurship, and multimedia. He has done consulting and teaching in more than a dozen countries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. He is currently visiting professor of communication at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain. Contact him at jamesbreiner@gmail.com @jamesbreiner

He previously worked for three decades in the newspaper business. He led a team of investigative reporters at the Columbus Dispatch, and he was later editor of Business First of Columbus and publisher of the Baltimore Business Journal. His work won awards from the Associated Press, Society of Professional Journalists and Press Club of Cleveland.